


Even in dreams he doesn't know me at all

by thelonggoodbye



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fae, Fae & Fairies, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:33:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27959981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelonggoodbye/pseuds/thelonggoodbye
Summary: BJ didn't believe in the fae before Korea. But he didn't believe in much of anything before he met Hawkeye Pierce.
Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce
Comments: 12
Kudos: 44





	Even in dreams he doesn't know me at all

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

BJ accepts a glass of gin from Hawkeye on his very first day in Korea. The next eighteen months, the next seven years, the rest of his life, all make sense when he considers that. Radar drinks a grape Nehi and watches him. 

The changes are hard to notice at first. BJ wants to be around Hawkeye all the time, but that’s nothing new. He imprints like a baby duck. He’d done it first with Leo and later with Peg. Only, it goes beyond even Peg in BJ’s second month in Korea.

Colonel Potter is there by then. When he’s in his cups, he tells folk stories. 

“The fae hate the Army,” he tells them one night in the Swamp. He takes a long drink. “But they’re here.”

“The fae aren’t real,” BJ says. He’s the only one laughing. 

“They are,” Radar says. He’s clutching his grape Nehi like he’s wishing for his bear. 

“C’mon, Radar, you can’t believe that.”

“I can sense ‘em. Like the choppers.”

Hawkeye doesn’t say anything at all. He hands BJ another glass of gin in silence. 

In the morning, BJ’s head doesn’t hurt at all. Wounded pour in and he takes the table next to Hawkeye. It’s so busy that it takes him an hour to notice that sometimes when he looks down it’s Hawkeye’s hands he sees instead of his own.

It’s easy enough to ignore. Something inside him picks at it, says, pay attention, but he can never quite focus. His eyes slide away. He tells himself he’s tired and that’s all. 

His hands are his own again, after that, except for in his dreams. 

He tries to tell Peg about it once in a letter. The words disappear as he writes them. His eyes slide away from the paper. Hawkeye says, “Hey, Beej, play chess with me.” When the game is done, his letter is gone. He doesn’t think about it again. 

People pour themselves drinks at the still. BJ decides it’s an Army custom, something about self-sufficiency or whatever else they’re taught. It takes time before he realizes that Colonel Potter, Margaret, and Klinger will all take drinks when he offers them. If Hawkeye offers, they pour for themselves. 

He corners Klinger in his tent to ask about it. Of the three, he’s most likely to give an actual answer without any yelling. Klinger laughs in his face, instead. “One of my uncles got taken by the fae. Even I don’t want out of the Army that bad.”

“Taken by the fae?” BJ asks. “Klinger, you can’t really believe that.”

“It’s true! Toledo has one of the largest Unseelie populations in the United States.” Klinger puffs out his chest a bit. “We learned young not to take drinks from strangers.”

“Hawkeye might be strange, but he’s not a stranger.”

“Yeah? Then what’s his real name?”

“Hawkeye Pierce,” BJ says before he realizes that no one is really named Hawkeye. It takes him another moment to say, “I don’t know.”

“And that’s the way they like it.” Klinger goes to work hemming a seam and BJ goes back to the Swamp. 

He manages to get that in a letter to Peg. Is it normal not to know your best friend’s name? he asks her. 

She responds, two weeks later, and says, It sounds like something out of a fairytale. Can you touch his skin with iron?

BJ tucks the letter in his pocket and wonders. It’s not like he happens to have iron stashed away in his boot, but he knows someone who might. Father Mulcahy is, as he always is, thrilled to have a visitor. “Are you here with a religious question?” he asks. “Or are you and Hawkeye planning another poker game? The orphans could always use more.”

BJ laughs. He knows it sounds forced and that’s confirmed when the Father squints through his glasses. “Are you alright, my son?”

“I don’t,” BJ starts. “Do Catholics believe in the fae?” 

Father Mulcahy asks, “Is this about Hawkeye?”

BJ pauses. “So the fae are real?”

Father Mulcahy is quiet for a moment. “Hawkeye is real. Perhaps that’s all we need.”

BJ is no more comforted when he finds Colonel Potter brushing Sophie and says, “Tell me more about fae in the Army.”

Potter stands up straight and stretches. “I wondered when you would get around to asking. Trouble is, it’s too late.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean a fae’s got you in his grasp tighter than a girdle on a matron and you’re only now wondering if they’re real.” He shakes his head, disapproving. “In the first war, fae were infantry, not doctors. They made good cavalry, though.”

BJ has more questions, but choppers appear. Choppers always appear on the horizon at the worst time. Radar agrees, later, when BJ’s slumped over a patient in post-op and Radar says, “My ma always thought I might be a changeling.” 

After fourteen hours of surgery, sometimes a man just has to let what’s coming to him show up on time. So he asks, “Are you?”

“Yes,” Radar says. “I don’t much mind. My ma’s still my ma and it helps, over here, fae magic does.”

“When you hear the choppers,” BJ starts. 

“Not with my ears, sir,” Radar says. “I don’t hear the words you’re going to say with my ears either.”

“So you hear—”

“Not everything, not anymore. Just what a person’s gonna say. When Colonel Blake was here, I could hear most of it. Anything surface level. But Hawkeye didn’t like me poking around in his head, even though I didn’t mean it, so he taught me.”

“Can Hawkeye,” BJ isn’t sure he wants to know the answer, but he asks anyway, “read minds like you can?”

“No,” Radar says. “Fae and changelings are different. I can lie sometimes. Sort of.”

And that’s something BJ hasn’t considered before, that Hawkeye can’t lie. It would maybe explain some of his bluntness, but that’s always seemed like it’s just Hawkeye. BJ waits a few days, but he wants to know. 

He’d rather know.

“Hey,” he says one night. Frank’s in Margaret’s tent, so BJ and Hawkeye are alone. Hawkeye’s on his cot stretched out in his shorts, a martini in hand. BJ has a piece of paper on his lap like he’s planning to write a letter to Peg, but he hasn’t lifted his pen. 

“Yeah, Beej?” Hawkeye’s voice is low, slightly slurred from the exhaustion of fourteen hours of operating. 

“There’s a rumor going around,” he says. 

“About Radar and Baker? I heard it. He’ll never go for it.”

“Not that.” Personally, BJ thinks Radar might actually manage to get his courage up this time. “It’s that you aren’t human.”

Hawkeye’s hand tightens on his glass. If BJ had blinked, he would have missed it. But he didn’t and so he can see the new line of tension in Hawkeye’s body. “I thought you were too smart to believe in non-humans.”

“I’m starting to think that maybe it’s not smart to dismiss something like that.”

“What if it’s safer?” Hawkeye stares him straight in the eyes. BJ had never thought his best friend could be scary, at least not to him. He’s rethinking that now. 

“And if I don’t care about safety?”

“You should. What are you writing to Peg about?”

BJ wants to keep pushing. He opens his mouth intending to ask, Are you fair folk? Instead, he says, “I’m going to tell her about how we dyed Klinger’s dress and convinced the lieutenant corporal he was a flying fish.”

Hawkeye says, “Don’t forget to tell her it was my idea.”

BJ tells her it was Hawkeye’s idea. He tells her everything about Hawkeye after that. Anything that comes to mind he scrawls, desperately, as if he’ll forget the way Hawkeye makes him smell his food or the look in Hawkeye’s eyes when he loses a patient or the way it feels to laugh so long and so loud he’s not sure his stomach will ever recover. 

Peg keeps his memories for him.

In her next letter, she writes, I feel like I know him too. 

Hawkeye talks about Trapper the way a man on death row talks about the outside. Sparingly, and with such a quiet depth of longing that it hurts to listen. Trapper never writes. BJ starts to write to Peg every day so he’ll hear back from her every day. It doesn’t quite work out that way, but when his mail comes, Radar hands him fourteen letters. 

In the last one, Peg writes, Are you sure you’re okay?

Hawkeye only gets one letter, from his dad, and a handful of magazines. 

“What does BJ stand for?” Hawkeye asks. It’s going on two am and they’re in the shower because BJ insisted he wouldn’t go to sleep with three day old crusty blood on him. Hawkeye goes where he goes most of the time, but after days in surgery they’re one step away from glued together. Or one shower stall. 

“Nothing,” he says. He rubs soap into his hair and dreams of hot water and shampoo. He doesn’t usually let himself think about home and its comforts, except for Erin and Peg. He’s not Hawkeye. 

Hawkeye doesn’t say anything then. But it turns into an obsession. He tells everyone in post-op, Radar, Margaret, Colonel Potter twice, and Sidney in a very loud call that BJ doesn’t trust him. He’s loud, mostly, but when they’re alone he’s quiet and hurt. “Why don’t you trust me with your name?” he asks over a game of chess. 

“I told you, it’s just BJ.” He tosses down a king. “Checkmate.”

“It can’t be checkmate, that’s the king of spades.”

BJ checks. It is. But Hawkeye can’t lie, he reminds himself. “Spademate,” he says.

“Spademate?”

“Spademate.”

Hawkeye tosses cards down. “Let’s go somewhere.”

“Mess tent?”

“For a walk.”

BJ follows him. Hawkeye heads straight to his favorite picnicking spot. BJ’s come here with him, once or twice before, but usually it’s reserved for the newest blond nurse. They don’t have a blanket or food and they can’t be here for the scenery, so Hawkeye must want to talk about something. 

“I don’t understand,” Hawkeye says once he’s sat and pulled BJ down beside him. 

“Don’t understand card chess?” BJ knows that’s not what Hawkeye is talking about, but he’s also not sure he’s ready to have this conversation. 

“You eat and drink what I offer. You don’t keep iron on you—”

“Who carries around iron?” BJ interrupts, but Hawkeye keeps going. 

“But you won’t give me your name. I don’t understand.”

“My name is BJ Hunnicutt,” he says. “Captain.”

Hawkeye moans. “Your name.” 

“Why do you want my name so badly, Hawk?”

Hawkeye won’t make eye contact. He’s not his over the top self. He means every word he’s saying. 

“Why do you want my name, Hawkeye?”

“John Francis Xavier McIntyre,” Hawkeye says. “Carlye Marie Breston.”

“Who?” BJ asks. Hawkeye is practically vibrating. The name John McIntyre knits itself together after a moment. “Trapper? He gave you his name?”

“Trapper John,” Hawkeye agrees. “But he forgot me.”

BJ remembers his first impression of Hawkeye, his manic obsession with missing his friend by ten minutes, with the way Trapper didn’t leave a note. 

“They always leave,” Hawkeye says, “and they always forget.”

“I won’t forget,” BJ says. 

“Close your eyes. Describe my face.”

BJ does. And looking at the blackness behind his eyelids, he can’t describe a single thing about Hawkeye Pierce. He doesn’t want to tell Hawkeye. Then a thought, unbidden and half forgotten, rises. Hawkeye’s hands. “Your fingers,” he says. “They’re long. Good hands for surgery. You have a scar on your pinky like a crescent moon, right at the base.”

He hears a soft exhalation, like Hawkeye’s been holding his breath for so long he’d forgotten he was even doing it. 

“My hands,” Hawkeye says. “You remember my hands?”

BJ opens his eyes. There is Hawkeye and every single feature is there, exactly where BJ should have known they would be. “I saw your hands. In surgery. Where mine should have been.”

“You can remember!” Hawkeye jumped off of his bed and threw himself onto BJ’s. “You can remember me even when I’m not there.”

BJ can’t help but get caught up in Hawkeye’s enthusiasm. It’s second nature to him now. “I am capable of object permanence.”

Hawkeye points at himself, “Not an object,” and then at BJ, “and a child compared to me.”

“You’re seven years older than me,” BJ complains. “It’s not like you were smoking cigars on the beach when I was born.”

Hawkeye wrinkles his nose. “Seventy years older. I round.”

“You round to thirty-five? You’re older than Peg’s dad.” BJ feels a pang when he says that. He’s not sure he’ll ever see Peg’s family again, or Peg, or Erin. 

Hawkeye sniffs. “I’m young at heart.”

“Sirs?” Radar says from a few feet away. 

“Not now, Radar, we’re busy.” BJ’s still watching Hawkeye, trying to put all these pieces of something he never used to believe in together. 

“It’s Father Mulcahy, sirs. He’s gone all…” Radar waves his hands around to illustrate something, but BJ can’t tell what, “glowy.”

Hawkeye swears and jumps up. “Stay here, Beej.”

“No chance.” 

They take off across the compound together. Hawkeye snaps something to Radar about getting Margaret that sounds like, “We might need her screeching,” but his blood is pumping so loudly in his ears that he can’t hear anything else. 

“When a person gets a bit of the fae in them,” his gram had told him once, when he was little and wanted to believe in magic, “they start finding it everywhere. Like attracts like. Don’t you forget that, BJ.”

He had forgotten. 

He wonders what’s next, now that he believes his best friend is a fae and the company clerk is a changeling. Maybe Colonel Potter is secretly a centaur. 

Father Mulcahy is in his tent, just like Radar said. He’s levitating, right there in the middle of the room, gold light coming out of his eyes and mouth. BJ freezes in the doorway. Hawkeye being fae, abstractly, that’s one thing. This is entirely another. 

Hawkeye shoves past him. “There’s no time,” he snaps. “Beej, get his Bible.”

BJ does. It’s a small, well worn black book that he’s seen a thousand times. In his hand, it falls open and he starts reading. Maybe it’s instinctual or maybe it’s another part of Hawkeye that has wormed itself into him. 

“Good,” Hawkeye says. BJ doesn’t stop reading, but something in his stomach warms. 

Radar and Margaret burst into the door at the same moment and get stuck until Radar backs up. BJ keeps reading, except he’s chanting almost and he doesn’t have to look at the printed words to know what to say. Some things in the 4077th never change. 

With Margaret inside, Father Mulcahy drops from the sky and right into Hawkeye’s waiting arms. Hawkeye huffs, but he stays firm under the new weight. 

“Radar, help me get him to bed.”

Margaret crosses her arms and glares at the air. “Go back where you came from,” she snaps. “I don’t have time for this, I’m needed in post-op.”

“Compassionate as always, Margaret,” BJ says. He notices his voice has stopped chanting. That’s a relief. His throat will be sore in the morning, or maybe Hawkeye’s will. 

“What’re you doing here?”

He holds up the Bible. “Stopped by for a bit of light reading.”

“Not another one of you.” She shoots a glare at Hawkeye. 

Hawkeye and Radar have gotten Father Mulcahy in bed. Radar’s got a hand on the Father’s temple and is muttering quietly to Hawkeye. 

“He wanted to come. What was I supposed to do, tell him we needed to avoid a bit of a possession?” He pulls Radar’s hand away from the Father. “Always more ghosts in a war.” His voice is sadder, now. 

“He’ll wake up soon,” Radar says. 

As if on cue, Father Mulcahy sits up. “Good morning, Hawkeye. And Radar.”

“Welcome back, Father.” Hawkeye’s voice is gentle in the way it only ever is with the Father and his patients. 

“I seem to have been a little bit possessed.”

“I think it was the one he lost last night. The little one from Idaho.”

“He was so scared,” Margaret says. 

“He’s not at peace.” Radar cocks his head like he’s listening to something. “He’s still here. He’s scared. And a little lonely.”

“Wouldn’t you be scared too?” Hawkeye asks. 

BJ shoves his hand in his pockets. He would be scared as hell to die, but Korea doesn’t scare him the way it does Hawkeye. And no wonder. They’re only BJ’s patients while they’re alive. 

“I’ll take care of him,” the Father says. “He’s only a lost lamb.”

“Who took a wrong turn right into your body.” BJ can’t help but shudder at the thought of the Father glowing and levitating. 

“It doesn’t hurt,” Father Mulcahy assures him. “Well, it doesn’t hurt me, anyway.”

Hawkeye grabs for BJ’s hand. They’ve never shied away from each other, but Hawkeye doesn’t reach for him out of the blue just to hold on, either. The ways they touch all have a veneer of deniability. BJ holds his hand. “Don’t get possessed, Beej,” he says. “You haven’t made room for two.”

With the disturbing knowledge that Father Mulcahy has enough room in his body or his head for two people, Hawkeye, BJ, Radar, and Margaret leave. 

“Babette called me over earlier,” Radar says. “There’ll be a storm tonight.”

Margaret nods as if this is normal. And BJ thought she didn’t like Radar. “I’ll make sure the nurses know to secure their tents.”

“The guinea pig tells the weather?” BJ asks Hawkeye. 

Hawkeye shrugs. “Useful. She’s never wrong.”

“She used to be a sailor,” Radar says. “Then she got cursed.”

BJ wonders off-handedly as he and Hawkeye walk to the Swamp if this is the end of his life making sense. He squeezes Hawkeye’s hand again. No, he thinks, the end of life making sense was when he came to Korea. 

He half expects Hawkeye to pick up their conversation where they left it or to explain what just happened in Father Mulcahy’s tent. It’s not surprising when Hawkeye pours two drinks instead. He hands one to BJ, who swallows half of it in one gulp. 

“You’re not meant to accept food from the fae,” Hawkeye says. 

“It’s not food,” BJ replies. He swirls it around in his glass. “I don’t eat much here.”

“No,” Hawkeye says. “Anything edible you get comes from Peg.”

“Peg’s human.” But after Hawkeye and Radar and Father Mulcahy and Margaret, he’s not so sure. “I think Peg is human.”

“Could be.” Hawkeye lifts his glass in a toast. “To broadening horizons.”

Learning Hawkeye isn’t human changes very little about BJ’s life. He’s still in Korea and Hawkeye is still his best friend. He starts noticing things out of the corner of his eye, things he can explain now but doesn’t want to. Margaret and Radar both start seeking him out more, too. 

It’s summer in Korea. They start burning up. Colonel Potter calls him into his office and tells him to sit. “I’m not going to tell you how to live your life,” the Colonel starts. 

“Spoken like someone about to give an order,” BJ says.

“No.” There’s something wistful and far away in the Colonel’s gaze, pointed somewhere over BJ’s shoulder. “Just advice from an old military man.”

BJ waits. Colonel Potter meanders, but he’s not half-senile like Frank thinks. He’s a very purposeful man. BJ wonders, sometimes, if he could’ve grown up to be someone like Potter if he hadn’t ended up in Korea. 

“War is an experience like no other. I know, I know, you’ve noticed. And you know how it changes a man. We’ve seen the same boys come across our table and they’re different each time. So are we. And a person gets to thinking he’ll never get home and it’s just fine, necessary, even, to put that energy into a new person.”

“Colonel?” BJ is almost certain he doesn’t like where this is going. 

“Your wife loves you, Hunnicutt. Make sure it’s you who goes back to her.”

When BJ leaves Colonel Potter’s office Radar watches him go, unblinking. Something in BJ, somewhere deep and primal, shudders. Not human, his brain says. But a more rational part of him says, Radar is safe. 

“Hawk,” he says, later, when they’re changing shifts in post-op.

Hawkeye hums back, focused on the chart of a patient who’s still likely to lose their leg if they can’t get him to Seoul and better equipment soon. 

“When you leave Korea, where will you go?”

“Crabapple Cove.” He puts the chart down. “I might need to get him back on the table tonight.”

“I’ll send Kellye if we need you.”

Across the room, Kellye perks up and nods. It’s a reminder that people are always listening. 

BJ has more to ask. Instead, he lets Hawkeye go. 

He turns the question over in his mind when he’s alone in the Swamp. After the war, if there is an after, and assuming both he and Hawkeye make it home alive, they probably won’t see each other again. Sure, they may say they’ll visit, but two sides of the country is a lot of ground to cross. 

And there’s a selfish part of him that doesn’t want to introduce Hawkeye and Peg. He doesn’t want to bring the two halves of his heart together.

If BJ thought the 4077th was busy before, it’s nothing compared to the supernatural happenings of the camp. He watches Father Mulcahy sneak some of their extra blood to a recently turned vampire soldier. Radar predicts the near future with stunning accuracy and speaks Korean like a native. And then there’s Hawkeye. 

It’s a commander who’s full of himself and his importance on the battlefield. He hasn’t even noticed his own men are terrified of him and begging for discharges not to get away from the fighting but to escape their commander, who is careless with their lives. 

BJ hates the war, sure. But it’s even easier to hate the personification of everything that’s wrong with the war. He complains to Hawkeye and begs Colonel Potter to do something. 

Hawkeye stops yelling about the situation after the first night. Instead, he gets quiet. BJ isn’t worried at first, even though he should be. Hawkeye even talks in his sleep. He only shuts up when something is going really, truly wrong in surgery. But BJ has his own anger to focus on. 

He writes a strongly worded letter. When he gets to the Swamp the commander is drinking a martini and BJ has to swallow his surprise. Hawkeye, who is sitting on BJ’s cot, winks at him. “Pour yourself a drink and join us, Beej.”

BJ does. He sits on Hawkeye’s cot and stares as Hawkeye makes nice with this murderer. The commander drains his drink and then makes to stand. 

“I’ll get you another.” Hawkeye stands smoothly. If he is actually drinking from his glass, it isn’t gin in there. “Give your name to the bartender?”

“Why?” the commander hiccups out. 

“I have to know your name,” Hawkeye says. “How else am I supposed to help?”

“Bingham Lacy,” the commander says after a moment, “Lieutenant Colonel.”

Hawkeye’s plan dawns on BJ too late. “Hawk,” he says. Hawkeye hands the commander his drink.

“Beej,” Hawkeye says. He won’t make eye contact. “Maybe you should go find Margaret. She might like a drink too.”

BJ stares at his cot, at the way Hawkeye is perched on it like a bird ready to take off. 

“Don’t do this,” he says. 

“It’s too late. BJ, you don’t need to watch.”

Colonel Lacy is halfway through his drink and listing over. BJ leaves. He sleeps on the floor of Father Mulcahy’s tent and wonders, quietly, about sin and what else is real. He and Hawkeye don’t talk about Colonel Lacy again. Colonel Potter fills out the forms, has him declared MIA, and that’s it. 

“Was he married?” BJ asks Radar. “Did he have kids?”

“No kids where he went,” Radar responds. “No nothing where he went.”

BJ doesn’t ask Radar any more questions after that. He turns to Margaret. He shows up at her tent while she’s hanging up laundry, in a snit after something Frank pulled (with Hawkeye’s help). 

“What do you want?”

BJ pauses. He’d never asked himself that before. The easy answer, the one he almost says, is to go home. But that’s not quite the right answer now. Instead, he decides on, “To understand.”

Margaret picks her hair brush up. She puts it down. “Do you know what I always wanted, BJ?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. “To be normal. To live the life you have with someone I love and who loves me. A family. A future. And you’re throwing all of it away. For what? Hawkeye?”

“Who says I can’t have both?”

“Anyone rational!”

“Hawk’s not very rational.”

Margaret sighs, a huge, gusty exhalation. "He sure knows how to pick. Every half-decent surgeon who walks in here only has eyes for him."

"There's Frank Burns."

Margaret glares. "Out! Settle your own romantic drama. You may as well be a movie for all I care!"

He vamooses. It's much safer to flee, if not very dignified. 

BJ finds himself back at Father Mulcahy’s tent. He’d never been religious before coming to Korea. He’d gone to church some, as a child, with Peg’s family, on Easter and Christmas. He’d never believed, not the way you were meant to. He hadn’t ever thought much about it, same as he’d always just assumed fae were the stuff of folklore.

Korea has changed a lot for him.

“Come in, BJ,” Father Mulcahy calls a second before he knocks. 

BJ pokes his head in. “Can I ask you a theology question?”

The Father lights up. “Please, come in!”

He does. He wonders how starved for religious company this man really is. It’s often just Klinger at church on Sundays, unless Hawkeye is hungover enough to sneak holy water. 

“It’s about Hawkeye,” BJ says. He pauses, but Father Mulcahy doesn’t fill the silence like most everyone else would. “It’s not about Hawkeye. It’s about this whole world. Before I got here, I didn’t think any of this existed. But it does and now I’m standing here like a fool questioning everything. And one day this war is going to end and I don’t know how,” he pauses. Father Mulachy stays silent. “I don’t know how to go back to Peg and Erin and just live a life with a mortgage and a car and a practice where my life isn’t in danger and one day leads to the next in order.” But that isn’t quite the crux of the matter. Father Mulachy is still silent, so BJ adds, “I don’t know how to leave Hawkeye.”

That’s what it all comes down to. It’s what it always comes to. Hawkeye Pierce.

When Father Mulcahy speaks, he says, “Well, that is a mess.”

BJ just laughs, because if that doesn’t half sum it up he’ll eat his hat. 

“You can’t turn time back. All you can do is make the most of what you have left.” The Father pats BJ’s arm. “And if I may say, both your wife and Hawkeye seem like the unconventional type. It may not all be as dire as you’re imagining.”

Father Mulcahy sends him off smoothly with a letter to add to the outgoing mail before BJ has even begun to process him calling Peg and Hawkeye both the unconventional type. He does feel better for it. 

Better enough to corner Hawkeye in the Swamp that night while Frank is in post-op. He pours the gin. BJ doesn’t need his mind any more clouded than it already is. Hawkeye grins. “Not starting without me, I hope.”

BJ hands him his glass and takes a step too close to be comfortable. Hawkeye doesn’t step back. “I propose a toast.”

“A toast? What are we toasting? Frank’s dedication to his work? Margaret’s shriek briefly blowing the roof off her tent?”

“A whole new world.” If BJ lets himself get caught up in Hawkeye’s nonsense now, he’ll never say what he means to. He’s close enough that it would be easy to reach out, to hold Hawkeye. Instead, he clinks their glasses together. “To you, Hawkeye.”

Hawkeye takes a sip. His eyes never leave BJ’s. 

“And to you, BJ Hunnicutt.”

BJ wonders, faintly, about possession as he leans forward, never breaking his gaze. When he presses his lips to Hawkeye’s, it isn’t earth shattering. It’s not home either, not the sweet and easy contentment of seeing Peg and kissing Erin’s forehead. Instead, it’s an electrical buzz that says, this is not safe, but that he never wants to leave. 

Hawkeye’s lips are dry and chapped, and even though Peg is tall he has to lean down at an entirely different angle. Hawkeye doesn’t melt into him, but he does kiss back and, after a moment, he curls one hand around the back of BJ’s neck, possessive. 

Hawkeye’s not one who needs to be wined and dined, although BJ knows he would enjoy it. Soon enough, Hawkeye has plucked his glass out of his hand and placed both safely out of the way. With that done, he shoves BJ back onto his cot.

BJ is used to being in control. Staring up at Hawkeye, face red and hair mussed, he feels anything but. He hasn’t felt in control since he got his draft notice anyway.

Hawkeye doesn’t follow him down. “Do you even know what you’re doing?”

“Of all the times for you to find your conscience.” BJ is half-hard and had big plans for the evening, but no dice now. “Get out of your head. Enjoy it.”

“What about Peg? Have you thought about what this will do to her?”

“Peg likes you.” BJ’s starting to bristle. He’s thought about this for months. Planned it all out.

“Peg hasn’t met me. What she likes is the construct of a fae best friend for her husband miles away. She probably thinks I’ll keep you safe.” Hawkeye spits out the word like it’s dirty. 

“Maybe she thinks you’ll keep me sane. Come on, Hawk.”

“Oh no, I won’t be your little plaything to be abandoned here as soon as the going gets rough. I can’t do that again. You find a nurse and have your dirty weekends with her. Or is the honorable BJ, who won’t even give his name, above that?”

“My name is BJ,” he snaps back, but it’s too late to argue. Hawkeye sweeps out of the Swamp in a cloak of pique to go who knows where. 

If only BJ’s other friends in Korea weren’t his CO, a priest, a virgin, and Margaret Houlihan. He picks Radar. Of anyone, the little corporal knows Hawkeye the best.

Radar’s hard at work on a letter to his mom when BJ strolls in. He hops up and wraps his blue and white terrycloth robe tighter around himself. “Hawkeye isn’t here! Sir.”

BJ peeks into Colonel Potter’s office. If Hawkeye is in there, he’s turned himself invisible. “Post-op, then?”

“No, sir.”

BJ checks anyway. When it turns up no sign of Hawkeye, he circles back to Radar, who’s sitting in bed clutching his teddy bear. 

“Where is he, then?”

“He’s gone to the mound.” Radar’s whisper reaches BJ well enough. 

“The mound?” BJ knows what he’s talking about. It’s about a mile out of camp, a huge pile of dirt that the soldiers who pass by swear moves sometimes. There’s more than one who has claimed to see beautiful women dancing around it by moonlight. He lends more credence to those stories than he used to. “Why’d he go there?”

“It’s,” Radar starts to say something, but stops. He fidgets. “He said he’s got to.”

“Then I’ll go after him.”

“You can’t.”

BJ eyes him. “Why not?”

“You can’t get in. And even if you do, they’ll kill you. Or take you and not like Hawkeye does. They won’t leave anything of you.”

“And Hawkeye’s gone there?”

“It’s the true home.” Margaret has slipped in from post-op, quiet as a devil. “He’ll be back.”

“Because I’ll bring him back.”

“BJ,” the tone is softer than Margaret ever uses with him. It’s almost pitying. “I don’t know what you and Hawkeye are playing with, but it’s never been you that’ll get hurt from it. Radar and I tried to patch him up after Trapper left, all the good that did because you just waltzed right in and he transferred it all. You’ve got a family back home. Don’t toss it all away now.”

“Hawkeye was real upset,” Radar agrees. BJ doesn’t know if he’s talking about tonight or when Trapper left.

“I don’t understand what he’s upset about,” BJ says. “I don’t understand.” BJ, unlike Hawkeye, can lie. He doesn’t meet Radar’s eyes, which are wide and hurt. 

“I’m going back to post-op before Frank notices I’m gone. But BJ Hunnicutt, you’re better than this.”

True to her word, Margaret disappears. 

“Seeing a banshee is supposed to mean you’re going to die,” Radar says. He holds his bear closer. “Her true face comes out sometimes still. When we’re going to lose one. Or when we’re in the mounds. Me and Hawkeye and Major Houlihan, we can go into the mounds and it’s still us that comes back out.”

The you would not be so lucky goes unsaid. 

“Radar,” BJ says. 

“Yes sir?” It’s not said so deferential to him, now, as it is during the daytime, during surgery.

“What does it mean to take a drink from Hawkeye?”

“He claims you.”

“And when he takes my name?”

“It seals the deal, if he accepts.”

“And he hasn’t accepted yet.” BJ puts his thumbs in his pockets, decided. “I have a letter to write. Will Hawkeye be back tomorrow?”

“When the sun is up.”

“Not much time.”

“Or an eternity, depending on how you look at it, sir.”

“Good night, Radar.”

True to Radar’s word, Hawkeye is there when BJ wakes up. They don’t talk about the night before, but Hawkeye is quieter now. Half a world away and then some. BJ has a letter to Peg tucked in his pocket and a plan. 

Peg’s response comes two weeks later. It’s impressive, for military mail. 

BJ’s not embarrassed to say he whoops when Radar hands it to him, right in the mess tent in front of everybody. 

Dear BJ, Peg has written, I don’t suppose I’d mind, if this is what you’re set on. I’d had a feeling, but was sure you didn’t know.

And at the bottom, a postscript meant for Hawkeye, His name really is BJ. Goodness knows I felt silly marrying him with it myself, but it’s what he’s got and that’s how you’ve got to meet a person.

“Where’s Hawk?”

Frank answers that with his usual sneer, “He’s off fraternizing with Nurse Bigelow.”

“They’re having a picnic,” Radar supplies.

BJ doesn’t manage to borrow a Jeep from Colonel Potter, but it isn’t a long walk and it’s a nice day anyway, as far as days in Korea go. Hawkeye’s not in his usual spot, but he’s nearby, underneath a tree with a book on his lap. He’s leaning against it, eyes closed and face turned up to the sun. Bigelow is nowhere to be seen. 

It’s lucky he’s not an enemy soldier, because Hawkeye would be dead. BJ feels sick for a second when he lets himself imagine it, but then he sits down next to Hawkeye and says, “Penny for your thoughts?”

Hawkeye doesn’t open his eyes. “They aren’t even worth that.”

“Got a letter.” BJ holds it out, but Hawkeye doesn’t move at all. “There’s a bit for you, at the end.”

“Read it to me?”

BJ does, reveling in the way Peg’s words sound in his mouth even so many miles away where he can’t kiss them out of her. He loves his wife. He’s just done pretending he doesn’t love Hawkeye too. 

It takes a moment, but Hawkeye shoots to his feet. “Your name really is BJ?”

“Mom named Bea and Dad named Jay,” he says, “and it seemed to fit.”

“You’re giving it to me.”

“A gift freely given.” BJ leans back against the tree. “It really is nice out here.”

He doesn’t have long to enjoy the feeling, because Hawkeye yanks him up and into his arms. “BJ! It is real!” 

“That’s what I’ve been trying—”

Hawkeye shuts him up with a kiss. It’s more than BJ had imagined. More than he could have imagined. Hawkeye seems to be everywhere, pulling BJ in closer by his waist so they’re pressed up against each other. Hawkeye pulls back and nips at BJ’s lip. “You could have told me.”

“You could have listened.”

The way Hawkeye kisses is desperate, but he’s gentle with BJ like he’s a precious object easily broken. Maybe, to Hawkeye, he is. 

BJ is the one to pull back first. “Hawk,” he says. 

“Shh.” Hawkeye pushes him back a step, until he’s flush against the tree. Hawkeye makes his way down, leaving kisses in a line down his neck and sucking a mark at his pulse point. BJ is almost certain that he had a point and that point was stop, but he gets caught up in the feeling of Hawkeye’s hands slipping up his shirt onto his bare back. 

“That’s where I am,” Hawkeye says, tapping a finger against the pulse point in BJ’s neck. “A bit of me is in your blood. Has been since the first drink you took freely.”

BJ yanks Hawkeye’s mouth to his. He’s lucky Hawkeye has a certain gracefulness in him, because the kiss doesn’t end up all teeth and knocking noses. Hawkeye takes to his new task of exploring BJ’s mouth remarkably well and chases any pesky thoughts away.

It’s the longest he’s ever heard the other man be quiet, except for when he was asleep. 

It occurs to BJ that he’s not holding up his end of the bargain. He’s used to leading and being ravished up against a tree in broad daylight by another man is all new territory. “Hawk,” he says again as they both pant for breath, “stop.”

Hawkeye does, but he doesn’t step back. His hands are up BJ’s shirt, although one seems to have been sinking steadily lower and perhaps making plans of an altogether different nature. He’s hard, his erection a solid weight on BJ’s inner thigh. And he’s buried his nose in BJ’s neck, inhaling slowly. 

“Not outside,” BJ says. 

“No one will come looking.” Hawkeye pulls his head back a bit to look up at BJ. “Are you worried about what they’ll think? The BJ Hunnicutt, man’s man, letting another doctor into his pants?”

“Haven’t let you in yet.”

Hawkeye’s gaze is lascivious. “You will.”

BJ thinks he probably will. 

“Not today,” he tells Hawkeye. “I’m not,” he trails off, but he knows Hawkeye’s got it. 

Hawkeye presses a kiss to his chin. “Not today. I’ve got a picnic and no nurse to share it with.”

“I wonder why.”

BJ leans against him to eat and Hawkeye makes them both smell every bit of food. He says, “Watch,” and weaves magic into a grape. When BJ eats it, it tastes like summer. 

“Could you have been doing that this whole time?” he complains. 

“Only when I’m happy.” Hawkeye holds out a piece of liver for him to sniff. “Doesn’t happen very often, what with this war and all.”

“But you’re happy today.”

Hawkeye traces a pattern on BJ’s leg. “I’m happy with you.”

BJ thinks that can be enough, for now. He doesn’t know what will happen if the war ends, or if it’ll ever end, but spending it bound to Hawkeye Pierce—well, worse things can happen to a man. 

A week later, in post-op, he asks Hawkeye, “Where will you go when this is all over?”

Hawkeye grins, a private smile that BJ is used to seeing as Hawkeye drops to his knees in the Swamp. “I’ve heard California is nice. Maybe San Francisco.”

BJ smiles back.


End file.
